Its
been a bitter
couple weeks between Apple and Adobe. While the pair's
relationship has long been icy due to Apple's lack of desire to
support Flash on the iPhone, in recent weeks Apple vocally attacked
Adobe and more.

3.3.1
— Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner
prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs.
Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or
JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code
written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link
against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to
Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility
layer or tool are prohibited).

That
prohibition appears to ban the ports made with Adobe's CS5 iPhone
linking tool. That tool replaces Flash calls with iPhone OS X
calls that yields a binary that looks almost identical to a
C-language app, but was originally written in Flash.

Yesterday
Adobe's Mike Chambers, Principal Product Manager for developer
relations for the Flash Platform at Adobe, announced that
the company would be officially dropping support for iPhone ports
after CS5.

Chambers makes it clear he has little
respect for Apple's moves mentioning many examples of Apple's App
Store restrictions and censorship. He writes, "However, as
developers for the iPhone have learned, if you want to develop for
the iPhone you have to be prepared for Apple to reject or restrict
your development at anytime, and for seemingly any reason."

Chambers
expresses his frustrations as he comments about the reasoning behind
Apple's move. He writes, "The primary goal of Flash has
always been to enable cross browser, platform and device development.
The cool web game that you build can easily be targeted and deployed
to multiple platforms and devices. However, this is the exact
opposite of what Apple wants. They want to tie developers down to
their platform, and restrict their options to make it difficult for
developers to target other platforms."

He warns
developers to prepare to have their apps developed in Flash to be
kicked out of the iTunes store. Many developers mention on
their sites or promotional materials that they use the Flash porting
tool. That indiscretion could make Chambers prediction come
true in many cases. After all, it's hard to recognize a port
via the binary, but if the developers itself has talked about porting
it, it's an easy catch.

Chambers concludes, "Personally,
I am going to shift all of my mobile focus from iPhone to Android
based devices (I am particularly interested in the Android based
tablets coming out this year) and not focus on the iPhone stuff as
much anymore. This includes both Flash based, and Objective-C based
iPhone development. While I actually enjoy working in Objective-C, I
don’t have any current plans to update and / or maintain my
existing native iPhone applications (including the AS3
Reference Guide, and Timetrocity).
As I wrote previously,
I think that the closed system that Apple is trying to create is bad
for the industry, developers and ultimately consumers, and that is
not something that I want to actively promote."

According to CNET, Apple has responded back to Mike Chambers' comments regarding Apple and Flash. "Someone has it backwards--it is HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and H.264 (all supported by the iPhone and iPad) that are open and standard, while Adobe's Flash is closed and proprietary," responded Apple spokeswoman Trudy Miller.

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